A New-found Language
For the history of modern English and its global triumph, the key moment occurs towards the end of the 16th century. The tentative beginnings of English imperial and commercial expansion saw the founding of small colonies on the eastern seaboard of America. These, together with the arrival of the Pilgrims, gave English a toehold in the New World. But the language of these settlers was not guaranteed to become the dominant language of the future United States. The Spanish had arrived there before the Elizabethan colonists, and there were French, Dutch and (later) German speakers who occupied substantial swathes of territory.
The earliest English-speaking settlers of America arrived before the Pilgrims made their famous 1620 landfall at Plymouth, Massachusetts, from the Mayflower. At the end of the previous century, Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552–1618) had helped to establish a colony at Roanoke on the coast of North Carolina. It was so shortlived and its fate so mysterious that it became known as the ‘Lost Colony’: when one of its founders returned from England after a three-year absence, almost the only trace of it left were the baffling letters ‘CRO’ carved on a tree. There was a more successful settlement in Virginia at Jamestown, named for the new English king. (The state itself had been named after James’s predecessor, Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.)
Colonizing the New World was always a perilous undertaking. In the 18 years of settlement in Virginia up to 1625, the survival rate among the colonists was about one in seven. No doubt many of them would have died had they stayed in England, but these fresh territories were hardly a paradise. The Virginians and other colonists were essentially adventurers, brave or desperate enough to be seeking a new start in a New World. They would not necessarily have been motivated by the Pilgrims’ desire for religious freedom.
The Pilgrims
Even at this early stage, however, the New World was not completely unfamiliar with what was to become its dominant language, as the Mayflower settlers discovered when they were greeted by a friendly Native American who already knew some English, probably acquired from fishermen out of the European fleets that were increasingly common on the northeastern seaboard of America.
The style of language that the religious separatists carried across the Atlantic was a reflection of their Puritan outlook. It was simple, vigorous and clear. An example is the following excerpt from Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims in Plymouth, written by two of the principal settlers in the year following that 1620 Plymouth landfall. A party of armed men is exploring the inland area and also looking for signs of the Indian presence. The spelling has not been modernized but the meaning is about as transparent as it could be:
When Wee had marched five or six miles into the Woods, and could find no Signes of any people, wee returned againe another way, and as we came into the plaine ground, wee found a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any wee had yet seene. It was also covered with boords, so as wee mused what it should be, and resolved to dig it up; where we found, first a Mat, and under that a faire Bow, and there another Mat, and under that a Boord about three quarters long, finely carved and painted, with three Tynes, or broches on the top, like a Crown; also betweene the Mats we found Bowles, Trayes, Dishes, and such like Trinkets; at length wee came to a faire new Mat, and under that two Bundles, the one bigger, the other lesse, we opened the greater and found in it a great quantitie of fine and perfect Red Powder, and in it the bones and skull of a man. The skull had fine yellow haire still on it, and some of the flesh unconsumed; there was bound up with it a Knife, a Packneedle, and two or three old Iron things. It was bound up in a Saylers Canvas Casacke [cassock], and a payre of Cloth Breeches; the Red Powder was a kind of Embaulment [embalming substance], and yeelded a strong, but not offensive smell; It was as fine as any Flower.
Most striking here is the reckless curiosity of the group, although it should be said that they had enough tact to replace the bones that they dug up. The only linguistic aspect that the reader may notice is the capitalization of many of the nouns, a habit that persisted in written English well into the 18th century, but which is now employed only for proper nouns.
There are some usages carried across by these early American settlers that persist in contemporary American English. The most familiar is gotten, which was already dying out in British English (Shakespeare uses it five times in his plays but more frequently writes got), even though this Middle English form still clings on in the old-fashioned ill-gotten and begotten. Fall, deriving from Old English, is universal in the United States but was long ago replaced in British English by autumn, from French. Other survivals include mad, primarily used in the sense of ‘angry’, hog for ‘pig’ and rooster for ‘cock’. But these original expressions are few and far between, and it is a myth that some remote parts of America – the Appalachian region of Virginia and the Carolinas are often cited – preserve the speech of 16th-century England.
How the Colonists Got their Words
The colonists required new words to describe features that were foreign to them: unfamiliar birds and trees, unknown plants and animals, even strange but man-made objects. The most obvious solution was to adapt the existing terms used by the native Americans who were already living on the eastern seaboard, the very tribes who were to be displaced by the settlers in the long run. The related languages spoken by these peoples, languages known collectively as Algonquian, were complicated for the new arrivals to grasp. Although some expressions like wikiwam or tamahuk made a fairly easy transition into English, others tended to get whittled away like twigs until they emerged in a form that could be comfortably handled. This applied to the tribal names themselves, with Tsalaki becoming Cherokee, for example, or Mohowawog turning to Mohawk.
John Smith (1580–1631), leader of the Jamestown settlement, noted down the animal name raughroughouns which turned into the raccoon. Other creatures Anglicized from the Indian include the skunk (segonku), woodchuck (otchock) and moose (in fact from the even simpler Narrangansett moos). An exception seems to have been those birds’ names that were derived from their calls, such as bobwhite and whip-poor-will. The same John Smith mentioned above is supposed to have transcribed the Algonquian word for ‘tribal adviser’ as Caw-cawaassough, which eventually emerged as the distinctively US caucus (although there is an alternative etymology from ‘caulkers’ meetings’, caulkers being workmen who made ships watertight). One contemporary Native American commentator has observed that the adoption of ‘caucus’ shows that the European colonists had little experience with genuinely democratic institutions, and were required to look towards native forms of self-government when they wanted a term for a consultative body.
Even in the relatively early years of European settlement, a linguistic pattern was being set by the country’s openness to new arrivals who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock. It should be remembered too that immigrants came not merely from particular Puritan enclaves of England like East Anglia but also from the descendants of the Scots who had been encouraged from 1609 to settle in Ulster by James I (as a method of destroying the indigenous Gaelic culture). Beginning a century later, what was eventually an estimated 2 million Scots-Irish made the longer voyage across the Atlantic. Supposedly, their aggressive and even anarchic streak of independence made them good frontiersmen.
Other Linguistic Influences
The English spoken by the Mayflower pilgrims and their descendants, as well as the other 16th- and 17th-century colonists, was to be augmented by the languages of other European incomers. The Dutch settlers were fairly small in number but had a disproportionate effect on the language, probably because they were concentrated around the New York area. New York was called New Amsterdam before the British seized it in 1664 but, even though the city changed its title, the Dutch left their name-stamp on the boroughs of Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Quintessentially American terms such as cookie, stoop (for front-door step) and waffle all have Dutch origins. The innocuous-sounding and outmoded exclamation Poppycock! comes from the not-so-clean Dutch pappekak (‘soft dung’).
The French impact was less marked in what subsequently became the United States of America, although it was fundamental to the development of Canada, which is still officially bilingual. A few current US terms – such as picayune and jambalaya, both from Provençal roots – can be traced back to the French-dominated region around New Orleans, capital of Louisiana (named after King Louis XIV, just as the capital was named for Louis’ brother, the duc d’Orléans).
The Cajun dialect, sometimes considered as a separate language, originated from the forced deportation by the British of the inhabitants of a French colony (Acadia) in the area around Nova Scotia in the 1750s. They settled in the bayous of Louisiana, the southern coastal area of creeks and marshes where there is still a sprinkling of French place names. The unromantic source of bayou may be the French for ‘entrails’ (boyau) and, if so, was presumably suggested by the winding waterways of the region. An alternative source is the Choctaw word bayuk, meaning ‘little river’.
Similarly, the effect of German was fairly localized. Early German-speaking immigrants settled particularly in Pennsylvania and the dialect that developed as a result of interaction with English was confusingly known as Pennsylvania Dutch (‘Dutch’ being an Anglicization of Deutsch = German). Other pockets of German speakers established themselves in Indiana, Montana and the Dakotas. The survival, albeit precarious, of Pennsylvania Dutch is explained by the still-closed nature of the Amish and Mennonite religious sects who use it and who have deliberately turned their backs on almost all aspects of the modern world.
More recently, the biggest linguistic donation to American English has come from Spanish speakers, far outstripping the contributions made by any European tongue other than English itself. This contribution dates from a later era, but some terms can be traced back to the early days of European imperial expansion. These words were either imported from Spain in the first place or were indigenous to the vast Caribbean region once known as the Spanish Main. The Carib peoples who populated parts of the area prompted the Spanish to come up with canibales or cannibals. (And that, in turn, probably gave Shakespeare the name Caliban for the ‘savage and deformed slave’ in his final play, The Tempest.) Canoe and hammock also come, via Spanish, from Caribbean words. Most visibly, the place-names of the southwestern USA are ample proof of the Spanish presence from San Francisco to the Rio Grande (literally, ‘big river’).
Perhaps most surprising of these early Spanish terms is barbecue, surprising because in its colloquial forms of barbie and BAR-B-Q it may strike us as such a modern word. But the barbecue goes back a long way, to the Spanish barbacoa, which was taken in the 17th century from a Haitian word describing a framework of sticks. Moving to another product that involves smoke and toasting, tobacco derives from the Spanish tabaco, the name they gave to the dried leaves which were smoked by the Indians, although an alternative application is to the tube or pipe used for inhaling. Whatever its origins, tobacco was firmly enough established in early 17th-century English for King James I to write a diatribe against its pernicious effects. From the same period, tomato and chocolate were Spanish adaptations of tomatl and chocolatl, both terms from Central America. From a slightly later period, avocado comes from the Aztec ahuacatl. Other expressions, such as plaza and tornado, were carried by the Spanish across the Atlantic.
An important strand in American English was the contribution of the Africans forcibly brought across in the slave trade, although it took some time for these words to enter the mainstream. For example, banana was the term originally used in Guinea, while the interjection OK may derive from one of the many regional languages in West Africa. Similarly, bogus, dating back to the late 18th century when it defined a counterfeit coin, may come from boko, a Hausa term meaning ‘deceit’. But the real impact of African-derived terms comes with the arrival of jazz and juke-boxes and, later still, musical forms like hip-hop and rap.
Native American Metaphors
The Native American languages had an impact too. As well as borrowing and simplifying Native American names for plants and animals, English also adopted various ideas and phrases for metaphorical purposes. Only a couple are literal. Indian file means ‘one by one’, while an Indian summer refers to a patch of good weather late in the year and derives from the fine Octobers in northeast America – although the phrase also carries the figurative sense of a period of happiness or achievement coming towards the end of a person’s life.
Generally, terms deriving from Indian culture were adopted for their graphic quality, sometimes worn down through years of use, as with burying the hatchet, going on the warpath, happy hunting ground or keeping one’s ear to the ground. Others have retained a certain sharpness: speaking with forked tongue or scalp-hunting (i.e., going after trophies in a single-minded fashion) and scalper (US slang for ticket-tout) or sending out smoke signals. Yet other terms, perhaps more familiar from old-style Westerns than real life, have distinctly disparaging or patronizing overtones: squaw, papoose (Native American baby), putting on warpaint (i.e., make-up), paleface, fire-water (for any strong alcoholic drink and supposedly a translation of an Algonquian word).
Some Native American-derived terms are current in US English but have never crossed the Atlantic. A potlatch, for instance, originally a winter festival, can be applied to any gift-giving occasion/feast. Caucus is a key concept in US politics but has almost no resonance in British English. Mugwump is even more unfamiliar: a Natick word connoting ‘great chief’, it came to mean a political independent or someone who is politically stand-offish. Totem, however, has acquired widespread metaphorical value in recent years, particularly in offshoots like totemic with the sense of ‘emblematic’, ‘symbolic’. It appears too in the phrase ‘low man on the totem pole’, indicating someone at the bottom of the hierarchy, even though the lowest position on a real totem-pole was actually quite an important one.
Further North
Out of the modest number of Native American words that have entered the English language, such as moccasin or tepee, the majority have come from the indigenous peoples who lived in what is now the United States or southern Canada. There is a handful, however, which have been borrowed from the Eskimo or In(n)uit tongues, spoken by the original inhabitants of Greenland, northern Canada and Alaska. The word Eskimo itself, first recorded in English in 1744, may derive from a term signifying ‘eaters of raw flesh’. The working dog of the region, the husky, may also be an adaptation – or, as language specialists would express it, a corruption – of Eskimo. The preferred current term, Innuit or Inuit, means no more than ‘people’ in the Inuit language.
Almost all of the few Inuit-derived expressions in English have come into the language quite recently. An exception is kayak which appears in the 18th century, about the same time as Eskimo. Igloo arrives in the next century. By contrast, two items of clothing – anorak and parka – have entered the dictionaries quite recently. More recent still is the colloquial British English sense of anorak, dating from the 1980s and meaning either a studious person or, more usually, an obsessive, the equivalent to the US ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’.
One word that the Inuit languages have not provided is any of their terms for ‘snow’. They are popularly – and mistakenly – believed to have hundreds of such terms, on the shaky logic that they live much of the time with the stuff. It is not true. The Inuit in fact have no more words for types of snow than we do.
Why does America Speak One Language?
America was – and is – a melting-pot of peoples and of languages. An interesting series of questions relates to why, given the astonishing diversity of the immigrant arrivals from almost the earliest days, the country did not become a botched linguistic jigsaw in which none of the pieces would comfortably fit together. Why didn’t languages compete in those places where, for instance, German and English speakers rubbed up against each other? Or, if competition was not an issue, what about simple co-existence? And while it is understandable that ethnic and linguistic groups in large cities should slowly lose some of their defining features, how was it that the isolated groups from, for example, the Scandinavian countries who settled in remote Minnesota or Nebraska would eventually make the shift away from their own languages?
The simplest answer is probably the numerical one. By the end of the 18th century, when the first census took place, there were more than 2 million people of English and Welsh extraction recorded in 16 states. To this must be added a substantial quantity of Scots-Irish. The total of the other principal language speakers – German, Dutch and French, in the order of their numerical significance – hardly exceeded 200,000. All of these figures may seem almost absurdly small to us, given the size of the landmass of the USA and the current population of the country (over 300 million). But it was always the ratio of English speakers to the non-English that counted.
The new non-English-speaking immigrants contributed much to America, including (sometimes) hundreds of terms from their own languages. But they had to grasp the rudiments of the prevailing language, which happened to be English. At least they had to grasp those rudiments if they wanted to venture outside their own communities, since the millions already in place were not going to suddenly start learning German or Dutch in order to converse solely with them. The very variety of the immigrant tongues would actually have helped establish English as the lingua franca. Had there been a single substantial rival to English, a battle for supremacy might conceivably have resulted. But there was no single rival, rather a diverse group of (mostly) European languages arriving in piecemeal fashion, each of which brought something to the table but none of which had the desire or capacity to sit at the top place.
Of course, many ethnic and linguistic groups did maintain their identity for a long time after their arrival, as is shown by the existence of well over 100 German-language newspapers in mid-19th-century America or the publication of up to a dozen Yiddish newspapers in 1930s New York. There were isolated groups who preserved their own tongue, as is still the case to an extent with the Amish. But the literal mobility of American society, from the earliest days of the pioneers trekking westward (‘Manifest Destiny’) to the age of the freeway, has been a powerful counterforce against the closed community and thus the long-term preservation of any language other than English.
More important than mobility, perhaps, was the aspirational nature of the new society, later to be formalized and glamourized in phrases like the ‘American Dream’. As Leslie Savan suggests in her book on contemporary US language, Slam Dunks and No-Brainers (2005), the pressure was always on the outsider to make adjustments: ‘The sweep of American history tilted towards the establishment of a single national popular language, in part to protect its mobile and often foreign-born speakers from the suspicion of being different.’ Putting it more positively, one could say that success was achievable not so much as a prize for conformity but for adaptation to challenging new conditions, among which would be acquiring enough of the dominant language to get by – before getting ahead.
By the time of American Independence, there is no doubt about the status or the future of English. Writing in 1780, John Adams (1735–1826), one of the signatories to the Declaration and the second president, foresaw the situation with a confidence that might sound arrogant were it not also absolutely accurate:
English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason for this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all obstacles that may be thrown in their way . . .
KEYWORD
Pow-wow
The earliest English-speaking settlers in the northeast of America adopted a number of words from the indigenous peoples, most obviously those that described animals which were unfamiliar to them such as the moose, skunk and raccoon. Pow-wow, from an Algonquian language, is first recorded in English in 1624. It derives from a word meaning ‘sorcerer’ or ‘medicine man’ and also applies to a ritual meeting, and hence to any kind of get-together involving a discussion between two or more parties. The word is enduringly popular, but it tends to be applied in a slightly facetious spirit, perhaps encouraged by the internal rhyme that makes a pow-wow sound less serious than, say, a summit meeting.